We're currently planning to upgrade our DC-ME environment from build 90023 to the most current production build.

However, my manager has some concerns about what the user impact will be, and wants us to test the upgrade scenario before rolling it out to our user base.

That being said, I wanted to know if anyone had any suggestions on how to test this out? My initial plan was to clone the VM that DC-ME is running off of, spin up a few Windows 7 VMs and install the build 90023 user agent locally. Then go through the Service Pack and Hotfix upgrade process on the cloned DC-ME VM, and see what happens when the local user agents reach out to get upgraded.

Our main concern is that we don't want our end-users to see anything - pop ups, errors, etc. In the even that there is some sort of notification (e.i. not completely silent install/upgrade), we'd like to know what to expect so we can communicate with our users and mitigate them submitting a bunch of erroneous tickets.

Does anyone have a more elegant or effective approach?

Thanks in advance!

Alex